Concentration Curve and Index

The concentration curve and concentration index, established as the standard tools for measuring socioeconomic inequality in health by Wagstaff, Paci, and van Doorslaer in 1991, capture how a health variable is distributed across the population ranked by socioeconomic status. The concentration curve plots the cumulative share of health (or ill-health) against the cumulative share of people ordered from poorest to richest; the concentration index is twice the area between this curve and the line of equality. Unlike the Gini coefficient, which measures pure dispersion, the concentration index is bivariate — it measures inequality in one variable that is systematically related to a second, socioeconomic ranking.